‘The Rise of Skywalker’ Review: We’re Not Mad. We’re Just Disappointed.
Editor's note: This is a spoiler-free review. You're safe to proceed.
Star Wars is defined as fantasy rather than science fiction, and the difference is in function. Science fiction is speculative and responsive; it engages with the present and poses ideas, implications, and alternatives concerning the human experience. Fantasy is the opposite. It’s transportive. It’s a mechanism for escaping everyday rules and responsibilities to go somewhere better. Star Wars has always been about escape, and The Rise of Skywalker is desperate to give that to you.
This mission gives Rise of Skywalker a degree of nobility, but also a streak of stubbornness that recalls the very context it wants you to ignore. It’s an earnest, sappy, devout Star Wars movie so anxious to please it never attempts anything exciting, artistic, or bold. It’s competent, but uncreative. Its cautiousness keeps it from being outright bad, but also from being inspiring.
The Rise of Skywalker tries to find emotion through references rather than organic story, and the result is economical but formulaic. You’ll receive answers to your questions—some even in the opening crawl—and you’ll encounter lots of old friends. You’ll hear lines from old movies and classic speechifying about the Light Side and the Dark Side. It’s all fine. Star Wars has been deploying these tactics for decades, and maybe returning to them is a good thing in your mind. Some fantasies are more about familiarity than possibility, like a fun dream or favorite book.
In 2017, Skywalker’s predecessor The Last Jedi introduced polarization to Star Wars fans, and the transportive nature of the saga vanished from how we discussed it and engaged with it. That movie overhauled Star Wars’ archetypes and complicated its ethics to a degree that offended portions of its audience, and as a result, Star Wars discourse became tied to reality. You couldn’t escape into a movie like The Last Jedi because by nature of how it was received, the very act of escaping into it became a statement. That might have been the movie’s fault. It also might have been the people who took its experimentation so personally.
In explicit terms, The Rise of Skywalker wants to correct that imbalance. It’s the most magical, starry-eyed Star Wars movie ever made. At every turn, it tries to invite you back into the mode of escapism that made the original trilogy and most of its offspring such a phenomenon. In Skywalker, every George Lucas-esque camera wipe, every blaster pew and lightsaber thrum, every cameo and wink and callback begs you to forget all the tribulation of the past two years and remember the Star Wars movies you loved when you were a kid. It’s effective in bite-size pieces, but end to end within a two-and-a-half hour movie, it’s tiresome. What’s the point of a $250 million movie if it’s just going to advertise a better movie you’ve already seen? Maybe that question is its own answer.
Borne out on screen, Skywalker’s attempts at slipping you a nostalgia pill don’t work because those attempts are inseparable from their context. For all the movie’s efforts to sequester itself, it’s nonetheless a correction on what it perceived people don’t like about its forerunner. This reduces Skywalker’s fan-service to pandering and its story to something bland. Not even Adam Driver’s great Kylo Ren—far and away the best part of the new trilogy—has the magnetism or power to make things feel fresh. The end result once felt impossible: a boring Star Wars movie.
Fantasy is about imagination, and Star Wars grew from a single movie to a global titan because its world accommodated so many different strange, wondrous, surprising stories. It was a sandbox. That’s how samurai stylings found their way into the Clone Wars animated series. That’s how gunslinger tropes influenced The Mandalorian. That’s how minor characters like Wedge Antilles and Darth Maul grew into mythic figures with rich, complex histories. Star Wars at its best was about newness, and discovery, and expansion. It’s disappointing the final Skywalker movie only reaches for things we already know.
Even so, people will love this movie for all the things it is not. That’s alright. Loving things—especially things like Star Wars—is good for us, and even people let down by this movie should give space to those who adore it. Star Wars used to feel like it belonged to everyone because it met everyone on a personal level: This was your adventure. But today, be it because of trolls, a lack of nuance online, or the intense scrutiny of the digital age, the boundaries of your Star Wars adventure are predetermined by corporations, critics, and fans. The Rise of Skywalker isn’t your Star Wars movie, it’s someone else’s idea of your Star Wars movie. It doesn’t belong to anyone. It just belongs to the past.
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